First of all, this is the first paradox database I worked in my life.

Secondly, I know this is going to sound stupid to you experts out there. But strangely enough, it's hard to find a good tutorial/ref on this thing.

My question is: what is the difference between alpha and memo? Why would you use one not the other? And which type corresponds to Oracle's varchar2?

Thanks a lot!

No such thing as a silly question. An alpha field is limited to 255 characters. A memo (or formatted memo) is a BLOB and does not have the limitations. The memo fields are a pain to export and in some cases can cause erratic report behavior if a stray odd character gets imbedded in them when someone pastes in something from a word processor.

Also, you can't query the contents of a memo-field. For example, you can't find occurrences of the word "XYZZY" or "PLUGH" in a memo-field, but you can in Alpha.

(Well, you can write a twisty little script to do it, but that's a real Adventure...)

Mike, I never had any trouble querying memo fields. What problems have you experienced?